Letter: Echoes of Palestine in the division of Bosnia

Sir: I wonder if Cyrus Vance and Lord Owen know that their 'cantonisation' plans have an instructive precedent. According to the maps they have drawn, 42 per cent of Bosnia's territory is to be awarded to the Serbs (31 per cent of the population), and only 28 per cent to the Muslims (44 per cent). Towns such as Brcko (44 per cent Muslim, 20 per cent Serb) will go to the Serbs rather than the adjacent Muslim cantons. Jablanica (72 per cent Muslim and 17 per cent Croat) will go to the Croats. The overall impression is that the aggressors are being rewarded, and the victim heavily punished.

To many Muslims, this will evoke the 1947 UN partition settlement for Palestine, under which the Jews, who formed 32 per cent of the population, were allocated 56 per cent of the land. That injustice served to alienate much Middle Eastern opinion from the West and provoked bitter and still unresolved instabilities in the region.

If Bosnia's Muslims (who, unlike the Serb and Croat leadership, have consistently advocated the ideal of a democratic, pluralistic state), are indeed to be herded into tiny 'Yugostans', surrounded by their victorious enemies and deprived of any outlet to the sea, then Europe must surely brace itself for a conflict no less interminable than the Arab-Israeli dispute.

To avert this, the UN must think again. If it does not have the political or moral courage to intervene militarily, it must lift the disastrous arms embargo against the elected Bosnian government, to enable that government to defeat the advocates of ethnic purity, and create a ghetto-free, united, pluralistic Bosnia. Otherwise, it will once again broadcast a message to the Muslim world which can only foster extremism, and discredit advocates of rapprochement with the West.

ABDAL-HAKIM MURAD

Oxford

2 February